[Mb-civic] 'Vanity Fair' Rips Media 'Conspiracy' in Covering Up Role in Plame Scandal

[Jef Bek]

Editor & Publisher

'Vanity Fair' Rips Media 'Conspiracy' in Covering Up Role in Plame Scandal

By Greg Mitchell

 Published: August 11, 2005 9:00 PM ET


NEW YORKIn an article in the September issue of Vanity Fair (not yet
online), Michael Wolff, in probing the Plame/CIA leak scandal, rips those in
the news media -- principally Time magazine and The New York Times -- who
knew that Karl Rove was one of the leakers but refused to expose what would
have been ³one of the biggest stories of the Bush years.² Not only that,
³they helped cover it up.² You might say, he adds, they ³became part of a
conspiracy.²

 If they had burned this unworthy source and exposed his ³crime,² he adds,
it would have been ³of such consequences that it might, reasonably, have
presaged the defeat of the president, might have even -- to be slightly
melodramatic -- altered the course of the war in Iraq.² In doing so they
showed they owed their greatest allegiance to the source, not their readers.

And their source was no Deep Throat, not someone with dirt on the government
-- the source ³was the government.²

 So in the end, he concludes, ³the greatest news organizations in the land
had a story about a potential crime that reached as close as you can get to
the president himself and they punted, they swallowed it, they self-dealt.²
And why did they do it? Well, ³a source is a source who, unrevealed, will
continue to be a source.²

 Even after the news first emerged last month that Rove had leaked to
Cooper, the media still waited days to even ask the White House press
secretary about it. It was a story, "in full view, the media just ignored."

 The title of the Wolff article is "All Roads Lead to Rove."

 Wolff mocks Time¹s Matt Cooper and Norman Pearlstine and can¹t seem to make
heads or tails of ³genuinely spooky² Robert Novak. He holds off full
judgment on the Times¹ jailed reporter Judith Miller, while noting the
"baloney" she retailed for the White House. But he pointedly notes,
concerning Miller, that reporters are born ³blabbermouths² and even when
they don¹t write or print a certain story they are prone to ³serve it up to
everybody they know.²

 He closes with a frontal blast at the media, many members of which will
soon be exposed, he predicts, for having ³lined up for these lies² spun by
the White House.